Brian Cashman spoke with reporters at Yankee Stadium after a rain delay that lasted nearly three hours eventually ended with game five being postponed until Tuesday at 4:07 p.m.
Fans were furious after waiting through the rain without an update, and Cashman could only offer his apologies, with the teams and the league at the mercy of the unexpected weather patterns.
“It’s the worst situation to have,” Cashman said. “You feel horrible that your fans are sitting through that. They’re hungry, they want to be here, they’re committed…nobody wants to have what happened tonight.
“A lot of people were forced to wait through some bad weather. And for that, we're sorry. I don't wish that on our fans ever. Nobody wants to have their customers struggle through that type of stuff. We all thought we were playing tonight, I can tell you that.”
Cashman said the surprise came from a new band of weather that popped up in the Newark area “out of nowhere” in addition to the rain that was expected to dissipate in time to play around 9:00 p.m. at the latest, but the new weather system would have led to the game being played too late in the evening, and the decision was made to push the decisive game five to Tuesday afternoon.
“The forecast was that at any point from 7:30, 8:00, 9:00 at the very latest, we could get this thing in,” Cashman explained. “The system started moving a little slower…it slowed down on us, so obviously it adjusted the goalposts to some degree, but at no point was it ever that we expected not to play. We expected to play. But a new system popped up…we were actually wrestling with a first pitch time when a new system popped up…that’s obviously what eventually took us down.
“A lot of us expected to have good weather once that system cleared. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”
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